Review by Booklist Review
Forty-plus years into his stellar career, the prolific Boyle retains his signature charm and wit while mining the human condition for its many intrinsic foibles. His latest story collection displays a breadth of subject matter, ranging from tales that obliquely confront such contemporary issues as a COVID-19 outbreak on a cruise ship and a mass shooting at a school to those blending futuristic elements like playing chicken with self-driving cars and a society in which a big-brother-like government issues citizens a life score. One standout, "The Apartment," is a Chekhovian fable about a young lawyer who buys an old women's apartment with a reverse annuity. The title story features an affair between two people who met on a suicide-prevention hotline, a setup that Boyle uses to explore loneliness, despair, mental illness, disconnection, and interconnectedness. Boyle's genius lies in his ability to describe characters through the eyes of other characters, adding nuance and depth. There's a rich musicality in Boyle's prose that frequently calls to mind his beloved blues recordings with a hearty rhythm section creating a vital heartbeat to echo a character's plight. His language can also take on a free flowing, jazz-like improvisational feel. Once again, Boyle's virtuosity shines.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Boyle (Talk to Me) skewers American culture, masculine identity, and the modern age in his splendid latest collection. In "These Are the Circumstances," a suburban husband kills a rattlesnake in his backyard, with disastrous results. In "The Thirteenth Day," an outbreak of Covid-19 on a cruise ship requires all the 2,666 passengers to quarantine for 14 days after the last new case, which they fear won't come until everyone gets it. They deal with boredom and frustration, and a marital spat prompts a woman to break protocol by leaving her "shitbird" husband in the "cage" of their cabin. The dystopian satire "SCS 750" imagines the U.S. taken over by China, the populace tightly controlled by a social credit system. Boyle's stories are raw, unflinching, and highly entertaining, and his characters are often rude, pleasure-seeking men, as in "The Shape of a Teardrop," in which the 31-year-old narrator lives with his parents and tends to his six fish tanks until his parents slap him with an eviction notice. No matter how unsavory the protagonists, their vulnerability eventually wins the reader's sympathy ("Whether I was six or sixty, I was the one getting thrown out in the street," the evicted narrator says in an internal monologue). Readers will be enthralled. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In six stories set mostly in central New York State, Natural History revisits the family of scientists, teachers, and innovators the expansive Barrett has featured regularly since her National Book Award-winning collection Ship Fever. From passengers quarantined while on cruise to a woman explaining to her barstool companion that she has ESP to a hyena loose in the south of France, I Walk Between the Raindrops shows off the award-winning Boyle's trenchant prose (50,000-copy first printing). In Bliss Montage, NYPL Young Lion Ma (Severance) reveals the absurdism of the everyday through push-the-envelope stories featuring a woman living with all her former boyfriends, relationships based on an invisibility drug, and the idea that burying oneself alive can cure all manner of ills (75,000-copy first printing). From prolific, icepick-exact short story writer Means, a Pushcart and O. Henry honoree, Two Nurses, Smoking explores grief and survival in pieces ranging from two nurses exchanging quiet support in a parking lot to a couple reuniting on the ski slopes after having met in a bereavement group.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The prolific Boyle continues to have fun and make literary mischief with his latest story collection. There's no reason why these 13 stories should seem so funny, as most of them confront individual mortality and some sort of cultural collapse. They run the gamut from the subversively real to the surreal in such a way that they blur the distinction between the implausible and the inevitable. The epigraph quotes the promise/threat in Willie Dixon's "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man": "I'm goin' to mess with you." And mess with you these stories do, whether it's removing the blinders from a series of privileged and deluded narrators or messing with the reader's understanding of where the author might be located in this artistic dynamic. "Key to the Kingdom" invites the reader to see the protagonist as the author, though there's always peril in doing so with this trickster. Now branded as F.X. Riley, he's returned to his alma mater--where he was known as Frank--to give a reading, and he is given something of a celebrity's welcome. "Not that he was a celebrity himself, or not especially--books were too obscure in this age to register to that degree on the social scale, especially literary books. Like his." It's a story that cuts close to the bone on themes of alcoholism, paternity, and academic suicide, making a strong case that its truth has nothing to do with how factual it might be. The title story doesn't tempt the reader to confuse author and narrator, though it rings every bit as true and is very funny in the darkest sort of way, as complacency provides little protection in the face of "something like a billion and a half stinking people all hurtling toward the grave. Like everybody else in the world. Like her. Like him." There's a futurism running through much of the collection, whether it's trying to avoid omnipresent facial recognition ("SCS 750") or submitting to the tyranny of vehicles that take you where they want you to go ("Asleep at the Wheel"), but it seems like we've already turned the corner into that future. A playful virtuoso with a deadly seriousness of purpose. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
